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Reasonable people can disagree and many would say the landscape you describe of "the ACC falling further behind the four power conferences" is not wholly accurate. A reasonable argument can be made that you have the SEC on one level and the remaining BCS AQ conferences all on a second tier with NO SIGNIFICANT difference among the four. The argument for a leadership change in Blacksburg in both the administrative and athletic areas stems more from age, health and orderly transition considerations than a quest for "better leadership". At the conference level, the ACC stacks up pretty well against every BCS conference in terms of leadership despite some lingering questions regarding Swofford's baby blue allegiance and the Raycom nepotism concerns. Furthermore, after surviving the utterly inept leadership of Mike Tranghese, Swoff looks like the Dalai Lama by comparison.

Originally Posted by chuckd4vt

I think we some are advocating for better leadership in Blacksburg and Greensboro. And while we are indeed in the ACC for a lomg while, new ideas would go a long way toward preventing the ACC falling further behind the four power conferences.

Reasonable people can disagree and many would say the landscape you describe of "the ACC falling further behind the four power conferences" is not wholly accurate. A reasonable argument can be made that you have the SEC on one level and the remaining BCS AQ conferences all on a second tier with NO SIGNIFICANT difference among the four. The argument for a leadership change in Blacksburg in both the administrative and athletic areas stems more from age, health and orderly transition considerations than a quest for "better leadership". At the conference level, the ACC stacks up pretty well against every BCS conference in terms of leadership despite some lingering questions regarding Swofford's baby blue allegiance and the Raycom nepotism concerns. Furthermore, after surviving the utterly inept leadership of Mike Tranghese, Swoff looks like the Dalai Lama by comparison.

About Blacksburg, nearly every hire outside of fball has been lazy and very cheap. An outside force, Frank Beamer has practically total control in fball matters, prevented then same thing occurring there. And WRT Greensboro, practically everything coming from there the last decade has stunk. I like the ND deal, but other than that the decisions have been headscratchers to say the least. An outside force, VA politics, saved them from taking Cause instead of VT. One could argue FSU and Clemson might be gone now had that occurred. And from there, it seems GT and UVA might have fell into the B1G. Additionally, they ruined the ACCCG by playing it in Florida in 20% full stadiums in the broad daylight and signed an initial ESPN deal that was embarrassingly less than what the Pac10 signed on for merely months later. And we are still pretty much bounded by that deal. ESPN hasn't had to outbid a soul for ACC TV rights lately. And they actually held the ACC's future in their hands thanks to that embarrassing contract. Had they not wanted the ACC to survive, they could have refused to cough up more dough and FSU and co. would be long gone. Anyhow, a polling of this message board's participants would have resulted in better decisions than what's come out of Greensboro since these expansion wars began. Seriously, folks have called all of these mistakes.

CC and I are going to start a pretty major housecleaning here soon. We're working on a new site design for TSL that will make the site simpler to use, more informative, and more mobile-friendly. Coincident with that, we're going to come up with strategy for cleaning up the boards and ridding it of posters who can't discuss things in a civil fashion.

I always say that we can't tell people "what" to say -- in other words, we can't control people's attitudes -- but we can definitely govern how to say it ... and take appropriate action if people can't be civil.

Every once in a while, you have to give a message board community an enema. This board's cleansing is overdue.

You need to do it. The constant negative drumbeat of some causes the whole board to take a negative turn. I am now more frequently wondering why I am paying for this experience.

Originally Posted by Will Stewart

CC and I are going to start a pretty major housecleaning here soon. We're working on a new site design for TSL that will make the site simpler to use, more informative, and more mobile-friendly. Coincident with that, we're going to come up with strategy for cleaning up the boards and ridding it of posters who can't discuss things in a civil fashion.

I always say that we can't tell people "what" to say -- in other words, we can't control people's attitudes -- but we can definitely govern how to say it ... and take appropriate action if people can't be civil.

Every once in a while, you have to give a message board community an enema. This board's cleansing is overdue.

You probably need to look at your opinions a little more in depth. I don't disagree on the lazy and cheap although Pete Hughes and Dresser would be two arguments against lazy. I interpreted your leadership comment earlier to refer to admin as well, hence my point. WRT to Greensboro there have been some decisions that with the benefit of hindsight could be called questionable but, there are explanations for the advance thinking. The championship game was a warm weather site and deferring to FSU, Miami and Clemson not to be a tobacco Road centric deal. You presume a lot of negative things COULD have happened, the FACT is they didn't. The TV contracts have as much to do with bad timing as ineptness. The ACC has typically negotiated earlier in the cycle while the others typically follow the SEC who sets the bar. Despite the bad timing the ACC is still in a very solid position contract wise and has one thing the other conferences don't going forward, that being the geographic footprint and the accompanying population. Finally, the leadership evaluation is relative to other conferences and the ACC compares favorably to most when you look at it from a comprehensive perspective, in my opinion.

Originally Posted by chuckd4vt

About Blacksburg, nearly every hire outside of fball has been lazy and very cheap. An outside force, Frank Beamer has practically total control in fball matters, prevented then same thing occurring there. And WRT Greensboro, practically everything coming from there the last decade has stunk. I like the ND deal, but other than that the decisions have been headscratchers to say the least. An outside force, VA politics, saved them from taking Cause instead of VT. One could argue FSU and Clemson might be gone now had that occurred. And from there, it seems GT and UVA might have fell into the B1G. Additionally, they ruined the ACCCG by playing it in Florida in 20% full stadiums in the broad daylight and signed an initial ESPN deal that was embarrassingly less than what the Pac10 signed on for merely months later. And we are still pretty much bounded by that deal. ESPN hasn't had to outbid a soul for ACC TV rights lately. And they actually held the ACC's future in their hands thanks to that embarrassing contract. Had they not wanted the ACC to survive, they could have refused to cough up more dough and FSU and co. would be long gone. Anyhow, a polling of this message board's participants would have resulted in better decisions than what's come out of Greensboro since these expansion wars began. Seriously, folks have called all of these mistakes.